Computer Hardware Information

Moving to a New PC


Getting a new PC is exciting and a pain. It's exciting because you get a faster processor, more storage and all the latest stuff even though it's outdated as soon as it hits your desk. The pain comes with re-installing all of your programs, re-customizing your preferences for programs, applications, and Windows, and transferring data to the new PC.

Lock Workstation Fast


When you work in an office, it's important to lock your workstation every time you step away from your computer. A pain, but a security measure. You wouldn't want someone sending a nasty-gram in your email address, would you? Here's a faster way to lock a workstation without going through the CTRL+ALT+DEL route.

Learn to Find Cheap Laptop Computers on the Internet


Cheap laptop computers are coming to a store near you. In fact, there are many there already. That?s because, like any newfangled electronics device, laptop computers were once the cream of the computer crop, which made them super expensive.

Nvidia Geforce 7800 GTX Review


Nvidia has done it again, with it's newest video card, the geforce 7800 GTX. If money is no object and you demand the best, this is the video card for you.

Heliodisplay --Computer Video With No Screen


Science-Fiction meets reality with this new video display technology.

Ergonomic Products 101


Human beings are scaling new heights day by day. Markets are becoming more and more complex and competitive. Companies launch new products, market them, but even then are not sure if their product will match the taste, need and pocket of the consumer. This is because numerous brands are associated with a single commodity. Some companies try to win the consumer?s heart via a low price while a few others offer an impeccable quality at significantly good amount. But at the end of the day what matters to the consumer is how the products minimizes the labor, enhances the work and its durability. This article will shed light on some of the eminent and world?s top quality products called ?Ergo Products?. There are a wide variety of ergo products. They range from keyboards, mice, armchairs to keyboard stickers, footrests, foot switches etc. The ergo products one amongst the largely used ones nowadays . The reason being their consumer friendly nature and their troubleshooting strategy.

LCD Vs. CRT


When buying a new computer, or upgrading your monitor, you may be in somewhat of a conundrum deciding between an LCD or CRT monitor. That's understandable because for most people the difference is just size. But there is much more behind each option than just some space saving. In this article we'll outline the pros and con's for each choice and then tell you what will best suit your needs.

The Importance Of Current Sense Resistor In Switch Mode Power Supply


Current sense resistor is usually located in the switch mode power supply section. Newer version of monitor-the b+ (boost) circuit also have this current sense resistor. If you repair electronic equipment especially the switch mode power supplies, the current sensing resistor is connected to the source pin of power FET (field effect transistor) and the other end to HOT GROUND. The value of current sense resistor is in the range of 0.1 ohm to about 1 ohm. The values are depends on the design of each power supply.

What to Do Once You Are Infected with Spyware, Ad-ware or Viruses


What to do once your PC is infected with spyware, ad-ware or viruses

How to Get the Case Off Your PC!


This is the first step to servicing, upgrading or removing PC hardware from your PC. Refer to my other articles on adding, upgading or removing just about any piece of hardware.

How to Change, Upgade or Remove an IDE Hard Drive


Hard drives - Hard drives are a little more complicated. First off, you have to know what you want to do with the hard drive. By this, I mean either you want it set to either SLAVE or MASTER. If you want to boot from the hard drive (load windows or whatever other OS off it) then you want it to be your master. If you already have a master, and you want to use this as extra space, set this hdd to slave. This setting change requires a jumper on the back of the hard drive to be moved. It may sound hard, but it's easy. These jumper configurations can be found on the back of the hdd; most have a small label which states which way is which. After setting the jumper, take the IDE cable that runs to your primary hard drive. This is the long, usually grey cable that runs from a slot on your motherboard to your primary hard drive. If you are putting your new hdd in as a slave, this cable should have a second connector on it not being used. Connect this to the new slave hard drive, but don't disconnect the cable from your other HDD.

How to Add or Remove an IDE ROM drive


CD ROMS - If you're adding or removing an internal cd-rom, dvd-rom, or just about any internal ROM that has an opening CD door, read on. Almost all IDE devices such as CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, etc. including burners and dvd burners are all installed or removed in the same fashion. If you're removing your rom, first remove the scrues from both sides of the rom. Make sure both sides are removed or you won't be able to get the device out. Once the scrues are off, unplug the drive; both the IDE ribbon cable that goes to your mainboard and your power cable. You may also have another wire running from your cd-rom to your sound card. This wire enables sound to play from your rom drive to your sound card, so when you play a cd on your drive you can hear it. Yank all cables running to the drive, then remove it. Simple.

How to Check Your IP


So you need to check your IP address, for whatever reason. Maybe you're playing an online game with a friend, or you need to access your PC remotely. Whatever the reason, there are a number of different ways you can check your IP address.

JunxionBox -- WiFi Access Everywhere


Now you can more easily access the Internet wherever mobile phone carriers offer high-speed data service coverage.

The Making of Energy Efficient Datacenters


The Crooked E: The Unshredded Truth About Enron is a wonderful movie to watch. It is based on the book, The anatomy of greed, written by a former employee of Enron, Brian Cruver. One interesting thing that comes on our minds is the size of all power companies. They are all huge. We all depend on power for just about everything and yet very rarely do we think about conserving energy. A typical PC for example takes about 135 watts of power. A data center with about a 1000 servers should typically take about 135 x 1000 Watts or 135 Kilowatts and that would just power the computers. This does not include the air-conditioning and lighting. According to to a research paper sponsored by The California Energy Commission in a datacenter about 50% of the total energy consumed is by the servers and about 35% is the air conditioners. Here are some interesting research done in this field - Feeling the heat- An interesting paper by Liebert describing the challenge of effectively managing the heat dissipation in datacenters. Heat-Density Trends in Data Processing, Computer Systems, and Telecommunications Equipment- This white paper provides valuable current data and best available insights regarding historical and projected trends in power consumption and the resulting heat dissipation in computer and data processing systems (servers and workstations), storage systems, and central office-type telecommunications equipment. This problem can be solved by making better energy efficient air conditioners and by making more energy efficient computers. Many companies have taken a lot of interest in subject. However, nothing substantial has been done primarily because of the market requirements. The end users still want to host their sites on the fastest processors which drives the market with the latest processors. Going at this rate we would reach a time soon when the energy required would be much higher than the energy available in the market. Intel, AMD, Transmeta and Via have all released processors which consume very low power. A typical Pentium or AMD processor consumes about 25 Watts of power, whereas these low powered processors take only about 5 watts of power i.e. about 5 low powered processors would consume as much power as a single main stream processor of today. These low powered processors are also generally fan less processors which means lower noise levels too. Intel has the centrino which has a lower power consumption than the regular pentiums. Intel also has the arm processors but those are RISC. Our prime focus would be AMD, Transmeta and Via. They all have some very promising products. One thing to be noted is that most of these low powered processors work only at about 1.2GHz or lower. So they won't be as fast the pentium4s. Which means one would have to host lesser sites per server. A good recommendation would be upto a maximum of 600 sites on a regular pentium 4 server. A low powered processor should comfortably take about 200 sites. One advantage of these low powered processors is that they have a very small form factor too. This means that one can have more such servers in the same space that is typically allocated to a high powered servers. All datacenters use a profitability matrix based on the following rule: Performance/Per Watt/Per Cubic Foot. This is one place where the low powered processors really score high. AMD Geode? NX Processor family comprises of the AMD Geode? NX 1250@6W processor, the AMD Geode? NX 1500@6W processor and the AMD Geode? NX 1750@14W processor. The first two in these consume only 6Watts of power and run without a cooling fan. According to AMD they provide the highest x86 performance for fan less operations. They are based on the mobile AMD Athlon processor technology. Transmeta was one of the first companies to develop low powered processors. For a long time Transmeta was known as the company where the Microsoft co founder Paul Allen had interests in and the place where Linus Trovalds, the father Linux, worked. Both of them are no longer part of the organization. Today they are known for the two processor families they have - The transmeta crusoe and the transmeta efficeon Transmeta Crusoe?- processors range from 500Mhz to 1.2 Ghz. According to Transmeta,Crusoe is a unique combination of software and hardware. It's this radical design that gives Crusoe its important advantages, and manufacturers of all kinds of electronic devices their first truly innovative new platform in over 25 years. Thanks to Crusoe, mobile devices can be made smaller and lighter than ever. These new devices will be more comfortable to use, too, because Crusoe generates very little heat a problem that plagues the industry's legacy hardware-only processors. And because it uses far less power, mobile devices running on Crusoe run far longer on a single battery charge, and Crusoe-powered ultra-dense servers do far more work per watt, far more efficiently. Transmeta Efficeon processors are the higher end processors from Transmeta and they run at upto 1.6Ghz and have high performance I/O interfaces. They are built upon Fujitsu?s next-generation 90nm silicon technology featuring transistors with a length of just 40nm. The entire Transmeta range not just uses the x86 instruction set, they also have full multimedia instruction support (MMX, SSE-SSE2). Transmeta has done very little in marketing in terms of selling their products for the server market. Like all other companies they have focussed on mobile products, set-top boxes etc.. While these products are great for the mobile market, they do have a great potential in the server market. FIC, JM-Net etc. have some products for the server market which run on the Transmeta processors. Via, the Taiwanese manufacturer purchased the Cyrix processors and has since gotten out of the race of faster processors with AMD and Intel. Instead they are focussing on fan less, low-powered processors. They have the Eden and the C3 range of processors. The power consumption varies from only 7watts to 15Watts. Additionally, the processors come with the PadLock Hardware Security Suite which provides a platform approach to computer security, ensuring uncompromising security performance. These features include the implementation of the Quantum-based VIA PadLock RNG (Random Number Generator), and the VIA PadLock ACE (Advanced Cryptography Engine) supporting AES encryption. According to Via, the VIA Eden-N Processor is the world's smallest, lowest power and most secure native x86 processor. It is a mere 15mm x 15mm in terms of size and consumes between 2.5W @ 533MHz to 7W @ 1GHz. Via again like Transmeta has not focussed in the server market. The images above give a good idea of the benefits of this processor in the server market. For datacenters, Via may be the best in the Performance/Per Watt/Per Cubic Foot matrix. Companies like Hitachi make some very good low powered hard disk drives which have a very small form factor. They have both IDE's at 7200 rpm as well as SCSI hard drives. Many may think it is better to take higher end servers as the power or heating problem does not directly affect them. As mentioned earlier a server driven by a low-powered processor would be able to take just about 200 sites. This means that a person with 600 sites would need to take 3 such servers instead of one higher powered server. Here are some benefits of this scenario. One of the biggest factors influencing the performance of sites on the internet is the capability of the network card (ethernet) . When all sites are hosted on just one server, they all would use the same network card to push the data. Now if these sites are distributed among 3 servers the amount of data that the sites can push would be 3 times more which means faster access to the sites. Another benefit is that if one of the site goes down all 600 people would not be effected, rather only 1/3rd the number of sites would be affected. Hence, the number of support request would be lesser. And finally, such processors are very affordable. Typically they would be just a third of the cost of regular mainstream processors.

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